My friend Colin Berry (above right, circa 1970) wrote a touching, tragic story about his older brother, Kevin, who competed in the Soap Box Derby and lost against a kid whose dad was found to have rigged his nephew's car with an electromagnet. His story first ran in MAKE, Vol. 7 and I'm glad it will be read by a new audience.
Bobby Lange won in Akron, too; the Boulder Daily Camera printed a picture of him, smiling and waving and wearing the white jacket. Kevin’s racer went up on blocks.
We didn’t pay much attention at first, but the next year, 1973, Bobby Lange’s cousin, Jimmy Gronen, also won the Boulder race and went on to win Akron as well. Yet officials had noticed a strange lurch as Gronen’s car came off the metal starting blocks, and the next day, they x-rayed it and discovered a powerful electromagnet hidden inside the nose of the car. It was wired to a switch Jimmy’s head activated as he lay back in his headrest, and gave him a jump off the line.
The scandal rocked the Derby. Gronen was stripped of his title, his winnings given to the second-place finisher. But the real blame fell on Jimmy’s guardian uncle, ski-boot magnate Robert Lange, Sr.  Bobby’s father. In legal documents and public statements, the elder Lange took full responsibility for the magnet’s idea (though not its construction), pointing out with indignation that cheating was endemic to the Derby.
At some point, officials asked to x-ray Bobby’s 1972 car, too  the car that had beaten my brother’s  which the D.A. found during his investigation had been built with $10,000 to $20,000 worth of engineering expertise. This was clearly beyond the rules. Though Derby cars are usually preserved for promotion, Bobby’s car was nowhere to be found, and remains so today.
